


Cool Cat

by HapaxLegomenon



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: -Ish, Alternate Universe, Catboys & Catgirls, Cats, F/M, Kenma loves cats, Kuroo is a cat, Magic, SWAG 2016, what could go wrong
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-18
Updated: 2016-01-18
Packaged: 2018-05-14 16:44:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,550
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5750611
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HapaxLegomenon/pseuds/HapaxLegomenon
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Being adopted by a cat wasn’t how he’d planned the day, but he couldn’t bring himself to be upset about it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Cool Cat

**Author's Note:**

> Written as a fill for the Sports Winter Anime Games (SWAG) 2016, and as such is appropriately ridiculous. Enjoy.

Sometime during high school, Kenma had developed the habit of leaving little dishes of food behind his dorm building, for the stray cats around campus.  It helped curb the fits of homesickness – why he’d ever thought that a boarding school would be a good idea, he’d never know.  He liked to be at home.  He liked to be at home where his parents understood him and the family cat would sit nearby as he played video games, close enough to reach out and pat for a purr, but not so close that Kenma felt closed in or trapped with her in his lap.  It had been a good system.  And then he’d gone all the way to Tokyo for high school, and the system had fallen apart, and Kenma had floundered for weeks and months until he discovered the stray cats, and that the kitchen staff would let him take scraps out to feed them.

Things had improved since then, and Kenma ultimately realized he liked Tokyo quite a bit, enough to stay after graduation.  And now, he had a small but close circle of friends, and a cozy little apartment all to himself.  He kept up the tradition of feeding the stray cats in his neighbourhood – a throwback to the moment he first felt that important turning point, that first feeling of _hey, maybe this isn’t so bad_.  And besides, he liked being around cats. 

Kenma had been considering adopting a cat of his own for a while, but for one reason or another, he’d never followed through.  In the end, he wasn’t even the one who made the decision.

The first time the black cat showed up along with the group Kenma affectionately thought of as his “usuals”, Kenma didn’t think much of it.  The little black cat was mangy-looking, scruffy, with hair sticking up all over the place like it didn’t know how to groom itself.  “Hello, who are you,” he murmured, half to himself.

The cat blinked at him and made a loud, choked-off noise – “ _Krr-rrow_ ”.

It startled Kenma into a laugh, and the cat flicked its tail.

“Hi, Kuro.”  Kenma held out a hand and a piece of tuna, and the cat eyed him hungrily for a moment, before pouncing clumsily on the fish.  It smacked its lips and wiggled happily and Kenma didn’t think he’d ever seen a cat so excited about food in his life.  He offered it another bite, and another, and soon enough, the cat was twining itself around and around Kenma’s legs, looking up at him and making eager little chirruping sounds.

“That’s all I have,” Kenma said, then blinked when the cat immediately sat down, ears drooping.  It was almost as if the cat had understood him… but that was ridiculous.  Kenma shook the idea away and scratched the cat behind its one floppy ear.  It immediately perked up and leaned into the touch, purring loudly.

Cute.

The other cats had long since dispersed, never bothering to stick around once the food was gone, and so Kenma gave the new black cat one last pat and stood out of his crouch to head to work.  He paused, after a few steps – the cat was following close, looking up at him with an expectant expression.  “No,” Kenma admonished, pushing it gently with the toe of his shoe.  The cat rubbed its chin on his ankle.  Kenma sighed.  And the cat followed Kenma all the way to work.

It made Kenma feel vaguely guilty, having to leave it sitting forlornly outside of the office building, but he reasoned that it was just after the food and would wander off once it realized he wasn’t coming back.  His hands probably just still smelled like tuna, that was it.  So he washed his hands and set to work, and soon thoughts of the needy cat were forgotten amidst lines and lines of code.  He wasn’t thinking about the cats at all when he was getting ready to go home – too preoccupied with thoughts of a new game, waiting for him at home.

Apparently the cat didn’t get that memo.

It was still sitting in the same place as it had when Kenma left it that morning, looking utterly bored in the second before it saw Kenma through the glass door, pricked its ears up and, from the look of it, started meowing excitedly.

“That your cat?” one of Kenma’s co-workers asked, tilting his chin as if there were another cat he could possibly have been talking about. 

“No,” Kenma muttered. 

The cat didn’t seem to have picked up on that, either.  It immediately started wrapping itself around Kenma’s legs, rubbing its head against his pants and purring loudly.

“That thing probably has fleas, you know.  You should wash those pants in extra-hot water.”  Kenma’s co-worker waved over his shoulder and laughed as he walked away, leaving Kenma to deal with the cat.  The cat that had stopped trying to trip him up and stood stiffly, looking almost offended.

Kenma spoke to it before he could think better of it; “I don’t think you have fleas.”

The cat immediately started purring again, and Kenma couldn’t help the smile that crept onto his face.  Silly cat. 

He wasn’t at all surprised when the cat followed him again, back home this time.  And he only hesitated for a moment before he opened his front door; the cat immediately shot between his legs and burrowed into his couch. 

Kenma wrinkled his nose and went to go fish it out.  The cat protested, meowing forlornly when all of its twisting and batting at his hands failed to yield a result. 

“Not allowed on the furniture until you have a bath,” Kenma told it, and it seemed to accept this, settling in his arms somewhat begrudgingly.  Still, Kenma had never known a cat that liked being wet, so he locked the bathroom door and hid anything breakable between a stack of towels before he turned the water on.  The cat was a surprisingly good sport about its bath; it sat in the sink, unmoving but with a grouchy expression, as Kenma directed water over its back and even made a valiant effort with a bar of soap.  It certainly didn’t come out squeaky clean, but at least Kenma knew that there wouldn’t be dirt (or fleas – he’d checked) all over his apartment.  He’d lifted up its tail, just to check – a boy.  Kenma had smoothed down the ridiculous cowlick on the side of his head – the side with the floppy ear – at least a dozen times, but every time, as soon as it started to dry, the twist of hair sprung stubbornly back into place.  Kenma sighed.  “Good enough,” he told the cat, who snuggled gratefully into Kenma’s towel and let Kenma carry him into his main living space without a fuss.

He did put up a fuss when Kenma pulled out a video game controller.  He batted at the cord and put his ears back and hissed, and kept shoving himself under Kenma’s hand or trying to walk across the controller as he held it. 

“Stop that,” Kenma muttered, and the cat climbed backwards up his chest to shove his butt in his face.  Kenma clicked his tongue and pushed him off, but he scrambled back onto his lap with a loud, offended _mrow_.

“Stop,” he said again, and in a frustrated, last-resort kind of way he tried to reason with the cat.  “Leave me alone.  I just got this game, I want to play it.  It’s supposed to be really good.  I’ll play with you later.”

Surprisingly – or maybe not, really, Kenma wasn’t sure if this strange cat could surprise him at all anymore – the cat immediately sat back and stared at him with an eerily calculating expression.  Kenma stared back.  Finally, the cat seemed to come to some kind of decision, and he curled up in Kenma’s lap, chin resting on his knee, and looked towards the TV.  Kenma ran a hand down his back and then, finally, started his game.  The cat let him play uninterrupted for two hours, only moving once, to climb up onto his shoulder and drape himself around his neck like a scarf, before he started to get restless and amuse himself by swiping and biting at Kenma’s hair.  Kenma decided that it was time for a break and dinner when his eyes started to hurt (from concentrating on the screen) and his ear was throbbing (from misjudged playbites).  The cat rode his shoulders all the way to his tiny kitchenette, and shoved his face excitedly into Kenma’s when he opened a can of tuna for them to share.  After dinner, the cat also followed him into the bathroom (opting to nap on the toilet while Kenma showered) and then invited himself into Kenma’s bed, where he curled up in the crook of his knees.

Kenma fell asleep to the sound of purring and the thought that being adopted by a cat wasn’t how he’d planned the day, but he couldn’t bring himself to be upset about it.  The last thing he remembered before falling asleep was thinking that he had to go out and buy a litterbox.

The cat fit so easily into Kenma’s life that after only a couple of weeks he couldn’t remember what his life had been like before him.  The cat – Kuro – slept beside him every night, snuggled against his back or curved around his neck, or in his favourite place, at the back of his knees.  They’d eat breakfast together, and go to feed the strays together, and then Kuro would walk Kenma to work and Kenma didn’t know what he did during the day, but he was always there when Kenma finished work.

The first time Kenma showed up to work with Kuro riding on his shoulder like a parrot, several of his co-workers had laughed themselves silly.

Kenma had fallen so easily into his routine with Kuro that he didn’t expect anything to change about it any time soon.  He liked routines, Kuro seemed to like the routines.  No surprises.  He was a very easy cat.  He seemed to understand everything Kenma was saying, he’d never run off or clawed the furniture (once Kenma’d bought a scratching post) or broken Kenma’s things.  And the best parts, in Kenma’s opinion – he made an excellent lap warmer during gaming marathons, and he somehow knew how to do his business in the toilet.  The litterbox sat unused in a tucked-away corner of Kenma’s closet.

They were happy.

And then one day, Kuro caused an even bigger change in Kenma’s life.

Or rather – Kuro was the one that changed.

It was just a regular night.  A Friday, so Kenma wasn’t planning on going to bed at a reasonable hour.  He was having a one-man movie marathon with a boxed set of discs, a pile of snacks, and his cat.  Nothing special, but he’d been quietly looking forward to it all day.

Kuro was lying across Kenma’s lap, purring, eyes-half shut in contentment.  Kenma scooped him up in one arm – Kuro just purred louder – and kissed the top of his head.

That’s when it happened.

One moment, Kenma had an armful of happy cat and another of snacks.

The next, he was being crushed under a very much human man and his snacks were scattered all over the floor – he was a little bit more concerned about the former.  Kenma froze.  The man slipped off of his legs and landed on the floor with an ungainly thump.

He rubbed his head, and groaned, and Kenma couldn’t think of anything to do but stare.  After a moment, the stranger on his floor looked up at him, his eyes immediately widening in alarm.

“Don’t freak out!” he said, and then stopped, his eyebrows drawing together in a very familiar confused expression.  Kenma’s heart nearly stopped.

“Kuro?” he said – whispered – and the man reacted immediately, glancing up to meet his eyes and smiling slightly.  “What…?”

“Um,” Kuro – his _cat_ , what the hell – said, sitting back on his heels and rubbing at his neck.  “It’s kind of a long story?  There was a witch involved, and, um, magic… tree bark…”

Witches.  And magic tree bark.  Of course.  Kenma took a long, slow breath in and tried to think.  “Are you a cat or a person?”

Kuro’s head twitched to the side, exactly the way Kenma’s cat always did when he heard something interesting.  “Both, I guess?” he said.  “I started human.  But I’ve, uh, been a cat for a long time.”  He cleared his throat and shifted uncomfortably.  “This feels weird,” he admitted.

“This is weird,” Kenma agreed.  He wasn’t sure what to do.  His mind was still reeling – he hadn’t quite gotten over the ‘my cat just turned into a cute boy’ thing, just yet.

Thankfully, Kuro seemed to have some idea of how to move forward.  “Can I borrow some clothes?” he asked, and when Kenma nodded dumbly he went straight to Kenma’s closet and, without hesitation, pulled his loosest sweatpants and baggiest t-shirt from a pile of rarely-worn clothes at the back.  Kenma jumped, just a little, before realizing – of course Kuro knew where to find clothes.  He’d been living with Kenma for months, after all.

Watching him move was absolutely surreal.  He looked entirely human.  Tall, surprisingly lean, definitely attractive, by Kenma’s standards.  But there was still so much of the cat in him.  His dark hair had the same ridiculous cowlick, and the way he walked and moved was exactly mimetic of the way Kenma’s cat always ambled around his apartment.  They were the same.  They had to be.

“Kuro,” Kenma said again, and for the second time Kuro immediately looked over at him, a fond and expectant expression on his face.  And Kenma had so many thoughts running through his mind, so many things he should do or say – but he simply said, “Stay.”

So Kuro did.

And it took some maneuvering, because while Kenma’s apartment was perfectly comfortable for one fairly small person and a cat, it started to feel a little bit cramped with two people.  Kenma wasn’t used to having a _person_ always around him, always in his space, and at first, it made him edgy and uncomfortable.  Kuro wasn’t used to being so big and his motor skills were frankly ridiculous, at first, but they both learned and adjusted.  It helped that they already knew each other.  That they already knew they loved each other.

“I think that’s what it was,” Kuro said into Kenma’s neck one night, his chest moving slowly against Kenma’s spine as he breathed and his knees pressed into the backs of Kenma’s.  “It was a long time ago.  But it was something about someone loving me as much as I loved them.”  He kissed Kenma’s hair.  And Kenma had no response to that but to roll over in Kuro’s arms and kiss him back.

One morning, a few weeks later, Kenma walked to work with Kuro beside him, arm slung around his neck like a scarf.  When they said and kissed goodbye at the door and Kenma walked into the office, he was greeted with a smirk.

“That your boyfriend?” his co-worker asked, grinning.

Kenma smiled.  “Yeah.”

**Author's Note:**

> Talk fandom to me on Twitter at [@paxlegomenon](https://twitter.com/paxlegomenon).


End file.
